CiviCRM Cookbook

CiviCRM Cookbook

Overview of this book

CiviCRM is a web-based, open source, Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software geared toward meeting the needs of non-profit and other civic-sector organizations.Organizations realize their mission via CiviCRM through contact management, fundraising, event management, member management, mass e-mail marketing, peer-to-peer campaigns, case management, and much more.CiviCRM is localized in over 20 languages including: Chinese (Taiwan, China), Dutch, English (Australia, Canada, U.S., UK), French (France, Canada), German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Swedish.CiviCRM Cookbook will enhance your CiviCRM skills. It has recipes to help you use CiviCRM more efficiently, integrate it with CMSs, and also develop CiviCRM.This book begins with recipes that help save time and effort with CiviCRM. This is followed by recipes for organizing data more efficiently and managing profiles.Then you will learn authentication and authorization and managing communication with contacts.Then you will be guided on using the searching feature and preparing reports. We will then talk about integrating Drupal and CiviCRM. You will also be taught to manage events effectively. Finally, learn about CiviCampaign, Civimember, and developing CiviCRM.

CiviCRM Cookbook

Credits

Foreword

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Setting Up CiviCRM

Introduction

Setting up a CiviCRM theme in Drupal

Setting up cron using cPanel

Adding items to the CiviCRM navigation menu

Refreshing the dashboard

Changing display preferences

Replacing words

Setting up geocoding

Autofiling e-mails

Creating new activities

Adding custom fields

Using Scheduled Reminders for activities

Using CiviCase to create an HR system

Installing languages and localizing CiviCRM

Organizing Data Efficiently

Introduction

Adding contact types

Adding a time-limited relationship

Using tag sets to quickly organize data

Using tags and groups to segment data

Changing option lists

Creating and updating a smart group

Using Google Refine to prepare data

Importing into CiviCRM using an import script

Using external identifier deduping rules to update contacts

Using Google Refine to create a unique ID

Importing relationship data

Exporting related data

Batch updating using profiles

Using the Power of Profiles

Introduction

Speeding up data entry

Using URLs to change profile displays

Creating a membership directory

Controlling the search result columns using profiles

Using the Profile Pages and Listings setting to improve usability

Setting up reCAPTCHA for user profiles

Controlling Permissions

Introduction

Integrating profiles into Drupal user accounts

Restricting access to custom fields

Using CRM profile permissions correctly

Creating permissions for administrators

Managing event registrations using CiviCRM Access Control Lists

Managing Communications

Introduction

Setting up a bounced e-mail account using Gmail

Creating mail templates for CiviMail

Creating mail templates for CiviMail in Drupal

Using tokens in templates

Creating custom date tokens

Scheduling CiviMail

Throttling mailings to comply with hosting restrictions

Creating newsletter subscription services using profiles

Creating newsletter subscriptions using URLs

Creating a standalone newsletter subscription form

Getting a CiviMail report

Mailing attachments in e-mails and CiviMail

Allowing users to update information without logging in

Searching and Reporting

Introduction

Creating a membership mailing list using Advanced Search

Using Search Builder to create a smart group

Adding the external identifier to full-text searching

Adding custom fields to a report

Adding an extra display field to a report template

Creating a dynamic relationship report using Drupal Views

Integrating CiviCRM with Drupal

Introduction

Enabling Drupal Views

Creating user accounts from contacts in CiviCRM

Mapping contact data

Using Webform CiviCRM to update relationship data

Creating user accounts on the fly with CiviCRM entities

Combining CiviCRM contacts with Drupal content using CiviCRM entities

Managing Events Effectively

Introduction

Using jQuery to control form elements

Using jQuery to show and hide form elements by user choices

Using CiviDiscount with CiviEvents

Collecting data for a paid event registration with Webform CiviCRM

Using a shopping cart and Drupal views for event registration

Using Campaigns, Surveys, and Petitions Effectively

Introduction

Using activities for campaign planning

Designing campaign dashboards in Drupal Views

Using surveys effectively

Recording survey results

Using get out the vote effectively

Using petitions effectively

Working with CiviMember

Introduction

Creating a membership directory using Drupal Views

Updating memberships by bulk data entry

Effective membership communications using reminders

Using price sets for complex memberships

Using CiviCase for membership induction

Developing for CiviCRM

Introduction

Setting up a local development environment

Finding developer resources

Exploring Drupal hooks

Exploring the CiviCRM API

Developing a CiviCRM Drupal module

Exploring CiviCRM extension development using Civix

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Creating mail templates for CiviMail in Drupal

CiviCRM's mailing system is excellent, but the templating system demands a certain degree of skills and knowledge of HTML, particularly if things go wrong.

Add to that the complexity of modern mail templates and it can become very challenging. When planning your CiviCRM deployment, you should consider the skill set of the users who are going to be responsible for sending out mailings. If the HTML-savvy skill set is not there, this recipe shows a different technique for creating perfect e-mail newsletters that use the CMS to create the e-mail. As a developer you will need to know a little about creating templates within your CMS system. In this example we will use Drupal.

How to do it…

Here we will create a new content type in our CMS to handle the composition of each mailing. Users will then be able to cut and paste the HTML into CiviMail.

Create a new Drupal content type. Call it email news or something similar.
Plan your e-mail newsletter content...

CiviCRM Cookbook

CiviCRM Cookbook

Overview of this book

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CiviCRM Cookbook

Creating mail templates for CiviMail in Drupal

How to do it…